In this talk, philosopher Achille Mbembe (Africa is a Country) considers the possibilities of a new planetary configuration of the human and the humanities, in light of what he calls the injunction to decolonize knowledge. Mbembe whose research interests lie in the social sciences and African history and politics, is specially interested in the emergence of “Afro-cosmopolitan culture,” together with the artistic practices that are associated with it.
We will have to learn to remember together, and, in so doing, to repair together the world’s fabric and its visage.
Achille Mbembe, 2020
65-year-old Mbembe lives in Johannesburg. He obtained his doctoral degree at the Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 1989 and subsequently obtained the D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’études politiques, Paris. He is currently Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has also held appointments at Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, and for many years at Duke University, in the Romance Studies Department and Franklin Humanities Institute.
Also check out: Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, the latest offering from Achille Mbembe (from the Wits Institute on Social and Economic Research in South Africa) takes its title from a remark by the late Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose work has long been arguably the most central influence on Mbembe.
Honorary contributors to DesPardes: Adil Khan, Ajaz Ahmed, Anwar Abbas, Arif Mirza, Aziz Ahmed, Bawar Tawfik, Dr. Razzak Ladha, Dr. Syed M. Ali, G. R. Baloch, Hasham Saddique, Jamil Usman, Jawed Ahmed, Ishaq Saqi, Khalid Sharif, Majid Ahmed, Masroor Ali, Md. Ahmed, Md. Najibullah, Mustafa Jivanjee, Nusrat Jamshed, Shahbaz Ali, Shahid Hamza, Shahid Nayeem, Shareer Alam, Syed Ali Ammaar Jafrey, Syed Hamza Gilani, Mushtaq Siddiqui, Shaheer Alam, Syed Hasan Javed, Syed M. Ali, Tahir Sohail, Usman Nazir
